Vintage British Erotic Novels

[Skaro2022]

I'm trying to find what there was in the way of vintage British literary erotica. I don't mean the "classics" like Lady Chatterley's Lover, but good old-fashioned 'dirty' books.

I know that the 1990s had the likes of Nexus, Black Lace, Headline Delta etc. but were there any home-grown smut books before then? The Confessions series and it's imitators from the 70s are all pretty tame, but is that all that was available at the time?

It just seems strange to imagine that in the 1970s and 80s, the heyday of Mayfair, and all the other explicit mags on the top-shelf, that there weren't books being sold as well. I know that at that time there was no shortage of books in the US being published by Greenleaf, Liverpool, and others, but I've never been able to find a British equivalent.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Skaro2022

I'm trying to find what there was in the way of vintage British literary erotica. I don't mean the "classics" like Lady Chatterley's Lover, but good old-fashioned 'dirty' books.

There's a rich history to English literary pornography, see

Mendes, Peter. "Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English 1800–1930: A Bibliographical Study" Routledge:2016

There are not precise British equivalents to the American publishers of the 40, 50s and 60s and erotic publishing industry of the first half of the 20th century got printed on the Continent. So if you were buying erotica in London in 1997, it was more likely printed in Brussels than in the UK. These were publishers like Jack Kahane, a Mancunian who headed off to Paris and founded Obelisk Press . . . publishing in English hugely important works like James Joyce, Henry Miller and Anais Nin . . . these couldn't have been printed in the UK at the time.

There's a memoir of Kahane "Memoirs of a Booklegger"

Kahane's son, Maurice Girodias survived the Nazi occupation, and restarted the press as Olympia Press . . . publishing important books like "The Story of O" and Nabokov's "Lolita".

[mossycleft]

https://openlibrary.org/

There are boatloads of just what you’re looking for here. All free and searchable.